There they are on the table in Snap’s Dutch office on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam: five sturdy black storage boxes containing the glasses of the future. Snap (the company behind the social media app Snapchat) has had glasses on the market with which users can make videos, but this is a different story. What Snap shows here is a augmented reality glasses†
AR (augmented reality) is the down-to-earth sister of virtual reality (VR). Unlike VR, the wearer is in the ordinary world, in the streets and between the buildings that everyone sees. But with AR glasses, a dinosaur can suddenly walk down the same street, for example. Mobile phones, glasses or (in the future) lenses project digital images over the physical reality with AR.
AR is already widely used on mobile phones. Perhaps the most famous example is from a few years back, when Pokémon Go took the world by storm. Children went out into nature with their phones in search of virtual creatures that had been dropped somewhere in the real world. And apps like Snapchat already make extensive use of AR to spice up selfies with virtual effects. But AR is not only used for games or entertainment. For example, Ikea launched its app Place in 2017. This allows interested parties to project the digital version of furniture from the Swedish department store in their own home, to see how that table or chair fits into the existing interior.
Clothing and eyewear brands also love AR. For example, Puma makes it possible to show what its trainers look like in real life via Snapchat’s camera app. The consumer only has to point his mobile at his feet. There are also various apps for educational purposes. For example, they can project parts of the human body or our solar system in school classrooms, while students walk around the virtual 3D objects.
Physical and virtual mixing
Connoisseurs expect that the technology will only really break through if it is offered through special glasses. ‘Only then will the physical and virtual worlds really mix’, predicts Tilo Hartmann, researcher VR and communication at the Free University of Amsterdam. ‘With a telephone, the physical and virtual worlds remain separated too much.’
Those AR glasses have been around for a while. Google came already in 2013 with the Google Glass up: the nerdy-looking tech goggles. Notifications were projected on the glasses, while the owner could also make film recordings. The latter led to unease among the general public and soon the owners of the pricey glasses were known as ‘glass holes† Google was too far ahead of its time, Hartmann looks back. A few years later, Microsoft came up with the hololens, which looks like oversized sunglasses. The glasses are intended for the business market, for example in warehouses to easily project the optimal route. The glasses do not offer a world-changing total experience, especially because the part of the field of view on which virtual images are displayed is quite limited.
In the years that followed, the hype surrounding AR was fueled by Magic Leap. This American tech company delighted investors and the public with extremely slick promo videos that showed a complete fusion between the physical and virtual world. Dream with your eyes open, Magic Leap promised. Once the glasses came out, the main thing that remained was disappointment.
Then there was a long silence. Until recently. Back to Snap, which connects 332 millions of users every day. At the moment this is still done via mobile phones. But that will change. In a few years, most Snapchat users will no longer use a mobile phone but glasses, they predict at the American company. And that is emphatically not VR glasses, emphasizes Qi Pan, director of Computer Vision Technology at Snap. ‘We don’t want to take people out of the real world and then put them back in a purely virtual environment. Our goal is to add value to that world through AR.”
With glasses, the experiences will not only be more intense and realistic, there are also more possibilities with glasses. Snap cites fitness as an example and shows how you can run against yourself with glasses, or rather: against the time you set yourself the day before. The glasses then project into the picture a running avatar that you can try to overtake. This is not possible with a cell phone in hand.
Needs a lot of computing power
The ideas are there, the technology is just far from ready. Quite a bit of computing power is needed to place virtual images in exactly the right place from the images of reality captured by the camera. And that too in real time. Snap’s early prototype AR glasses that de Volkskrant could try, proves that. The so-called field of view (the part of the screen on which the extra layer is placed) is, just like with the Magic Leap and Microsoft’s Hololens, for example, still quite narrow, while the glasses become very hot after fifteen minutes. Ultimately, Snap doesn’t want to market nerdy glasses, but hip ones that don’t require constant power, are not too heavy, do not get hot and whose entire screen is suitable for computer simulations. That will take at least another five years.
In the meantime, other tech companies are not sitting still either. Facebook’s parent company Meta already has VR glasses, but in a year or two the company hopes too his first AR glasses to offer for sale. CEO Zuckerberg left at the end of last year during a presentation his imagination run wild. “You can take your virtual items into the physical world,” Zuckerberg promised, after which he showed a video of someone playing a game of chess on a virtual chessboard opposite a friend’s hologram.
Apple’s Tim Cook also likes AR: “I think it’s one of those technologies that we’ll ask afterwards how we ever did without,” he stated last year in an interview. Apple is expected to first come with combined AR/VR glasses who works with an iPhone† Later, pure AR glasses should also appear (codename Glass) that functions independently† And finally, in May, Google showed a concept of AR glasses that translations of conversations can show to its wearer.
Expectations in Silicon Valley are high, but Eef Masson, who researched AR at the Rathenau Institute, is not confident about the outcome of all the efforts of the wealthy tech companies. The perception of reality is at stake in AR even more than with VR, Masson argues. ‘Risks arise precisely by mixing the physical and the virtual. With VR you know you’re in a different world, with AR that’s not necessarily the case.’ The design of this new hybrid world should not be left to commerce, Masson believes: ‘An AR environment can become one big playground for advertisers.’ It will become even more difficult for consumers to distinguish between advertising and reality, while tech companies can collect even more personal data from consumers to highlight exactly the products that may interest them.
Glasses are not only something with which the gay consumer moves through hybrid worlds and can immerse themselves in new experiences, as well as the device that can track their eye movements to map what arouses the wearer. Golden dates. It is precisely for these kinds of things that politicians must draw clear boundaries, Masson believes.
Common experience
She sees more potential dangers: ‘Can we still speak of a common experience when we start wearing these types of glasses?’ According to her, this trend has been going on for a while and is difficult to reverse. ‘Think of people with earphones on the train, who are in their own world, disconnected from the sound of the crying baby in their compartment. AR extends this development by also adding or filtering out visual elements. I’m concerned about that,” Masson says. In the report Fake Real There are therefore a number of design rules. For example, the Dutch government could impose a moratorium on the use of AR applications in the public space with which citizens can be identified by means of biometrics. Another obligation Masson thinks about: always a warning label on the screen with a virtual object: ‘this is fake’.
Tilo Hartmann is enthusiastic about all the new possibilities, but he also warns about the dark sides of the new technology. Like Masson, Hartmann fears, for example, that the world will fragment even more than it does today and of which news bubbles are just the first signs. But also: what effect do AR glasses and lenses have on our behaviour? ‘We know from psychological research that we behave differently when we feel that people are watching us. What will this do to us if we know that we can always be scanned by our fellow humans through their glasses in combination with facial recognition, he wonders. ‘Perhaps it feels like a kind of collective God who is always looking over our shoulders’, Hartmann outlines the not too distant future.
And so society and politicians have to think about these kinds of issues now. But that is difficult, he admits: ‘The problem with innovations is that as long as they are not urgent, they are not on the agenda of the policymakers. But as soon as it does become urgent, it is too late to intervene.’
Meanwhile, the big tech companies are rumbling on. Those glasses are coming anyway.